Curiosity May Have Found Ancient Martian Life Signs

[StormShaun]

We can only hope that Marauder Shields saves us before we discover Prothean ruins D:

Oh man, I totally forgot about him.
It's bad because I'm playing Mass Effect 3 for the second time. >.<

Let us hope the ending to our story is better.

RIP Marauder Shields. 2186 CE - 2186 CE.

 

[Therumancer]

I just want to note that if this proves to be true and there was any form of life on mars, that it is not good news at all. But to be honest I don't think that that will be the case.

Why is this "not good news at all" ? I can't see any reason why this is a bad thing, aside from knee jerk reactions of idiot, religious fundamentalists. But they already have idiotic knee jerk reactions to everything under the sun, so what's one more thing for them to flip their shit about? Seriously, why would this be a bad thing?

No, I did not mean bad news for religous fundementalists (but I presume that would be bad news for them also).

It would be bad news because it means that humanity as a whole is more likely to die off.
It basicly has something to do with the question why we have so far never seen any signs of very high level intelligence (like Star Trek, whole-galaxy exploring, intelligent) even though there are billions of stars out there with possible habitable planets where life could have formed.
The idea is that not seeing any advanced species other than on earth means either (A) we are alone or (B) there is some kind of event that sooner or later wipes all life of a species that has become powerful enough (like nuking itself, which in someway almost happened to us during the cold war). So there is basicly a bottleneck that every species has to get through.
So finding life on another planet (especially one that is right next to us) means that we are not alone or "special" at all and probably are going to die off soon like all the other speicies on other planets before us.

I really didn't do those ideas justice but this here is a pretty good article about it: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
I highly recommend reading that, it is super interesting.

Anyway, I hope this helped
Finding other lifeforms on a different planet would be really a discovery that would spark big changes and would be very exciting, but as I described also very terrifing.

I've heard a lot of theories over the years about aliens both positive and negative. This ranges from everything to aliens keeping earth as an anal bordello, to lengthy "mathematically sound" scientist quoting rants by groups like Extra Credit that we have to be alone (or space travel impossible) because otherwise we'd have contact with aliens already.

My basic attitude is that our knowledge is currently too limited to predict all the variables. That said our most basic mistake is assuming that if we were discovered by aliens that they would want to just fly up and introduce themselves or immediately set about conquering us. Scientists always go on about how on earth less civilized peoples always get conquered or eliminated when more civilized ones encounter them. The idea being that if aliens found earth they would immediately set about eliminating us and colonizing the planet (assuming such worlds are as rare as they seem) and/or stealing all our resources. Something I've always found odd when one of the big things our more civilized and technological civilizations have done is gotten away from that and even looks back at the past with regret. In a lot of our speculative fiction one of the first things we address is policies like Star Trek's "Prime Directive" we would likely put into force to prevent such things. To me it's struck me as odd that we assume an alien civilization would be less moral than we are out of hand, and wouldn't have created policies similar to the ones we ourselves consider.

That said another point that tends to slot people off when I bring it up, is that humanity is not united. We do not have any kind of government that can speak for us on a planetary or species-wide level in dealing with other interstellar civilizations. As much as a lot of liberals detest the point, earth could not deal with the universe at large while divided into multiple nations and cultures, nobody could trust us, and it would be a pain in the arse if they had to wait for some kind of consensus before we do even simple things. Any way it goes we would likely need one world government before we would be contacted, even if there aren't other requirements such as having developed our own space faring technologies (in Star Trek a species needs to have a functioning Warp Drive before it can be contacted). Basically someone needs to unite, or conquer, the world. I also don't think we'll even be able to do much in the solar system on our own even without aliens as long as we remain divided as well.

To put it bluntly here as well, while aliens might be able to deal with any of the first world civilizations, understand that huge amounts of our planet also remain in barbarity. The Middle East is still governed by religion and keeps women as slaves for example. Asia, south and central America, the continental hellhole we call Africa. With the state of so much of humanity they would probably be unwilling to enter dialogue with even current world powers given that we could very well be transient in a world where nations like Pakistan have nuclear weapons and countries like Iran and North Korea are well on their way. This goes along with the divided earth bit above, basically if aliens landed in the US, UK, or other civilized first world nation that they could deal with, it could set off a war as barbarian nations strike out of fear the possible advantage that could grant. Not to mention that if such aliens ever dealt with these nations and acknowledged themselves as earth authorities, they might become obligated to get involved in wars down here just to preserve them. I mention this because there are some conspiracy theories that speculate that this already happened and started "World War II" a lot of Hitler's scientific edge having come from alien benefactors who pulled out when they realized Hitler wasn't going to be able to unite the world or impose order without more direct intervention. Not likely, but I doubt aliens would want to get involved in things like this any more than we would in visiting alien plants.

Basically all rambling aside, my basic attitude is that if there are aliens out there I think they wouldn't be contacting us yet and we'd be being kept intentionally isolated, probably until humans unite the world for good or ill, or we get craft outside our solar system, perhaps both.